Janice Fiamengo on White Feminists, By Mrs Vera West

I have long been disturbed by the over-the-top wokeness of white feminists, who seem to do all the standard practices, but taken to theatre of the absurd lengths. Feminist critic, and former English professor, Janice Fiamengo, always has challenging critiques of the follies of feminism, that would be difficult for the tribe to address given their fanatical anti-reason stance, generally seeing such conceptual criticisms as male logic.As Fiamengo details, feminism has now become so woke that even when white feminists make self-denigrating expressions about their race, such remarks are seen by the non-white part of the feminist tribe, as "racist."

It is clearly a case now of the children of the revolution easting the parents, and it is something we critics of feminism should welcome. Let it all implode!

https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/pity-the-white-feminists

"In the topsy-turvy world created by intersectional feminism, it is now impossible to say in advance what may be deemed racist if uttered by a white woman. Nearly anything, even self-denigrating expressions of racial admiration, may be judged beyond the pale.

Last week, a political candidate for the Ontario NDP (the New Democratic Party—Canada's Gucci socialists) was forced to resign just prior to the Ontario provincial election because of comments she had previously made about black women, comments that the leader of the party, also a white woman, said were "deeply concerning."

What exactly was concerning about the comments the candidate had made? Well—that's where things get odd.

It turns out that Amanda Zavitz, a part-time professor of sociology and women's studies at Western University and candidate for the Ontario riding of Elgin-Middlesex-London, had said at a conference the previous year that she preferred black beauty to white beauty, and wanted to be black.

Speaking at a conference of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Zavitz recalled another conference she had attended 10 years previously in which participants had been asked to write down a secret. Some had written about having an affair or stealing money from their spouse. But Zavitz's secret wasn't like those. "My secret is that I want to be a Black woman … because I think Black is much more beautiful," she confessed. "The easy answer is that I want to be bell hooks, and bell hooks was a Black woman."

That was enough to cause the end (temporarily, at least) of Zavitz's political career.

Whither White Privilege?

It's hard to imagine a black or brown woman being forced to surrender her candidacy because she mentioned the beauty of the white race or celebrated an icon of white feminism such as Simone De Beauvoir. Various black and brown women, in fact, have done well for themselves with objectively disparaging anti-white statements: for example, alleging that social progress will be achieved only with the deaths of older white people (thanks, Oprah!) or declaring that "White Lives Don't Matter."

One can almost (though not quite) feel sorry for Zavitz, whose racism seems to have consisted mainly in fantasizing about not being white—a mental pathology, perhaps, but one not necessarily directed at black women, or anyone other than herself.

Given that most of the last 40 years of feminist theorizing has consisted of exhortations to white women to admit they are racists, center the experiences of racial others, and work zealously to undo the system that confers white "privilege" (a nasty form of unearned advantage, according to sociologist and women's studies professor Peggy McIntosh, whose work is almost certainly known to Zavitz), it is not surprising that Zavitz would secretly, or not-so-secretly, want to exchange a stigmatized identity for a more celebrated one.

Anti-white animus has been a primary theme in feminism at least since the late 1970s. Zavitz's hero, black feminist writer bell hooks, in Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982), had complained that the history of feminism showed all too clearly that white women "had not undone the sexist and racist brainwashing that had taught them to regard women unlike themselves as Others" (p. 121). Never stopping to question whether Asian or African women also saw themselves as the norm in the countries where they were the majority, hooks castigated white women for speaking as if the word woman was synonymous with their experiences, thus revealing that "women of other races are always perceived as Others, as de-humanized beings who do not fall under the heading woman" (pp. 138-39).

Always?

Having accepted this (wildly exaggerated) criticism and lived with it for who-knows-how-many years, Zavitz seems to have taken to heart the scorn and disparagement that so many black and brown feminists have been happy to mete out to white women. Although it is impossible to say anything certain without knowing the entire text of her now-disappeared speech, which I have not been able to find, it seems that Zavitz believes, with some justification, that in North American academic and political circles, black women have more cultural authority and cachet than white women. But it's an intersectional sin to say so.

"I want to lead the fifth wave of feminism," she told the audience, "and when you look like I do and people call you a Karen, it's difficult to be taken seriously." She also confessed that "The more complicated answer is that I want to know all that I know, I want to be a sociologist and a women's studies professor. I want to be an expert in inequality with lived experiences of poverty and living in addiction and alcoholism. I want to be able to share my ideas without the barrier of looking the way I do."

In other words, it seems that she acknowledged that she wanted to retain her relatively privileged life as a university professor (yet with lived experience, as she seems to say, of poverty, addiction, and alcoholism) but also wanted, somehow, to claim a black identity. She did not, as has been repeated on X, say that she wanted to be black "in order to gain the lived experience of poverty, addiction, and alcoholism."

Yes, what she did say was cringe-worthy: too much information, too personal, a discomfiting mixture of guilt and envy at the intellectual level of a 15-year-old girl. It is weird and pathetic that this is what feminists are like, that Zavitz has spent time and mental energy fantasizing about how her life would be better, and her political dreams closer to fulfillment, if she were black. But is it racist? And racist against black women?

Her detractors would have it so. The Ontario PCs (Progressive Conservatives), who tracked down the video in the first place, relished the opportunity to call out Zavitz's white tears (how quickly so-called conservatives adopt the tail-chasing values of the cultural Marxists they think they oppose). They alleged that Zavitz had "trivialized" the life experience of Black Ontarians.

But she wasn't talking about Black Ontarians. She was talking about the subject that has preoccupied feminism for decades: the "lived experience" and attendant standpoint epistemology of racial and other marginalized groups. Zavitz merely went beyond the permissible in pointing to the reality of black female power.

The Fraud of Intersectionality

As if to reinforce Zavitz's point, DEI advocate Nicole Kaniki, the black director of a consulting firm that specializes in—you guessed it—diversity and inclusion, criticized Zavitz for her "lack of understanding." Kaniki's own statement repeatedly misrepresented Zavitz's message in order to condemn her:

"She wants to be a Black woman to be a better advocate and ally, which really just demonstrates her lack of understanding about the Black woman experience," said Kaniki. "It objectifies us further [sic] as if our race and gender is something that we can put on and take off and that she can put on." [This is simply untrue: Zavitz's whole point, crazy enough, was that she couldn't "put on" the black female experience, which was inaccessible to her as a white woman—despite her desire for it. Notice that Kaniki seems to assume that there is only one "Black woman experience."]

Kaniki also lambasted Zavitz for wanting to lead a fifth-wave feminist revolution: "What about making space for Black women to lead ahead of you rather than leading for them?"

Here we come to the nasty heart of the matter: the power struggle between competing groups of women, all vying for superior victim status, and the allegation that it is Zavitz's duty to "make space" for black women to lead.

Intersectional feminism, promoted in the early 1990s by Kimberlé Crenshaw (in her essay "Beyond Racism and Misogyny") was supposed to provide a more nuanced understanding of different women's experiences of "intersecting" axes of oppression. In practice, it quickly spawned a near-endless contest of one-upmanship that white women were bound to lose as they competed for the "lived experience," in Crenshaw's words, "at the bottom of multiple hierarchies." This race to the "bottom" (most oppressed) where one's understanding was allegedly clearest and one's right to speak greatest, triggered an avalanche of victimhood claims.

In sum: Zavitz lamented that, as a white woman, she was effectively barred from leading a new wave of feminism. Kaniki, a black woman, responded by telling Zavitz that, as a white woman, she should be barred from leading a new wave of feminism.

The incident, though forgettable in itself, is a vivid illustration of the whacky taboos and shibboleths that make up modern feminist orthodoxy and lay moral traps in abundance for heterosexual white women, who now not infrequently find themselves in the position of whipping boy, almost as tainted and blame-worthy as the male enemies they originally organized against."